Weapon of Misinstruction

Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb

by Allan Carlson

The Population Bomb, Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich’s
Malthusian classic, appeared in May 1968, just two months before Pope Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae.
The two documents seem far apart. The former argues that a mounting gap between
human numbers and food “will continue to its logical
conclusion: mass starvation.” The latter builds on Paul VI’s 1965
appeal to the United Nations, asking that nations “strive to multiply bread
so that it suffices for the tables of mankind, and not, rather, favor an artificial
control of birth . . . in order to diminish the number of guests at the table
of life.”

Catholic Obsession

Yet they are closely intertwined. The prophetic message of Humanae Vitae,
particularly its prescient warnings about the consequences of severing sex from
reproduction, emerged when parts of Asia and Africa were evidently starving and
mounting expert opinion demanded population control.

For its part, The Population Bomb is obsessed by the Roman Catholic Church,
angered by the pope’s apparent intransigence, and hopeful about a potentially
rebellious laity. (I wish I could report that the book’s angry obsession
also extended to my corner of the Christian world, but alas, Ehrlich finds the
Lutheran Church in America of that era to have “a highly enlightened policy
on population.”)

Time and again, Ehrlich veers off to grapple with his Catholic problem. He takes
heart that lay Catholic use of contraception appears similar to that of non-Catholics.
However, “conservative elements in the Church hierarchy still resist change.” The
author notes that a majority of the papal commission charged with studying the
contraception question had concluded that contraceptive methods (other than abortion)
were consistent with “the teaching on responsible parenthood of the Second
Vatican Council.” It is “a mystery to informed Catholics” why
the pope has not acted.

He labels the rhythm method “Vatican Roulette,” joking that people
who practice this form of contraception “are commonly called ‘parents.’” Ehrlich
mocks prominent Catholic scholars who have families of ten or more children,
while concurring with his “Catholic colleague” John Thomas that existing
Catholic teaching “contributes to misery and starvation for billions, and
perhaps the end of civilization as we know it.”

The Population Bomb stands as one of the most effective propaganda tracts
ever published in America. On every college and university campus, the specter
of imminent doom caused by human numbers motivated the children of the Baby Boom
to embrace Ehrlich’s “obvious first answer”: “Set an
example—don’t have more than two children.”

The Baby Bust followed, with American fertility dropping to a historic low by
the mid-1970s, well under a two-children-per-couple average. The drop was particularly
sharp among American Catholics. As late as 1967, twenty-eight percent of young
“devout” Catholics still planned to have five or more children.
By 1971, less than seven percent did. The anti-natalist ethos of The Population
Bomb had triumphed over the welcoming spirit of Humanae Vitae.

Poor Ehrlich

Today, it is easy to see the manifest errors of logic and prediction made in
The Population Bomb. Ehrlich’s dire warnings—that “the
world . . . is rapidly running out of food,” “the battle to feed
humanity is already lost,” and “in 1984 the United States will quite
literally be dying of thirst”— appear absurd today.

It turns out that Ehrlich was a poor biologist. While briefly noting the existence
of “new high-yield varieties of food grains,” he failed to see the
real promise of “The Green Revolution,” which would soon transform
even nations like India from grain importers to grain exporters. The author also
failed to grasp how quickly simple pollution restraints could clean up the air
and water, restoring even Lake Erie—where “the water is so full of
filth and chemicals that not even boiling or chlorination will make it safe”—into
a prime walleye fishing hole.

Ehrlich was also a poor demographer. Mesmerized by the projections on his simple
population growth chart, showing a population of 60 million billion people
by the year 2865, Ehrlich missed the deeper trend. He vastly overestimated modern
humankind’s “urge to reproduce.” The long-term population story
is actually the relentless downward pressure imposed by capitalist industrialism
and modernity on human fertility. In the early phase of the “demographic
transition,” death rates fall, resulting in population increase. However,
after a few decades, fertility also starts to fall, as both centralizing government
and a competitive economy deconstruct the family.

Mass public education that separates children from parents, social security incentives
that favor the childless, market forces that crave the isolated worker and consumer,
all drive fertility down. Ehrlich calls the children of the post-war Baby Boom “the
gunpowder for the population explosion.” In fact, the American Baby Boom
was a historically unique, even fragile event, a one-generation wonder that briefly
defied the more profound anti-natalist currents that mark modern life.

Ehrlich was, in addition, a poor political economist. He complains about falling
food and commodity prices, oblivious to the fact that this means abundance, not
scarcity. Starvation was a reality during the 1960s. However, it was the product
of ideology, politics, and corruption, not overpopulation.

Routine “crop failures” in Russia were the result of past Communist
collectivization drives, just as was the great Chinese famine of the early 1960s.
Food shortages in India and Africa derived from the socialist “central
planning” fantasies of Third-World economists trained at the London School
of Economics. In new nations such as Nigeria, would-be farmers faced daunting
regulatory (and bribery) burdens before they could plant their first seed.

Preying Ehrlich

How, then, can we explain the book’s success? Part of its power lies in
its seductive prose, an exasperated breeziness that gives energy to its arguments.
Ehrlich also preys on human weakness, cleverly transforming acts long considered
hedonistic—such as deliberate childlessness or sterilization—into
a kind of heroism. In addition, Ehrlich ably manipulates key phrases. Good health
care becomes “death control,” the supposed source of still greater
disasters such as mass starvation, famine, and war. He juxtaposes “death
rate control” over against a more humane “population control.”

The Population Bomb also effectively combines induced fear with a sense
of the inevitable. Ehrlich offers three scenarios showing “the kinds of
disasters that will [his emphasis] occur as mankind slips into the famine
decades.” The first sees the United States launching nuclear weapons to
save Thailand from a starving China. The latter responds by landing five “dirty
bombs” on American soil, killing 100 million people.

This is relatively optimistic, though, compared to Scenario II. In a script that
reads like a blend of the film On the Beach with the Patrick Swayze classic
Red Dawn, massive famines sweep across South America, and the whole continent
goes Communist. “Pope Pius XIII” (a “good” pope, it appears)
denounces America for “eating meat while the hungry of the world lack bread.” Mexico
falls to the Reds just as 90,000 die of smog poisoning in Los Angeles.

America’s draconian “one child per couple” policy comes too
late to prevent the devastation of our fisheries and farmland. In 1980, a general
thermonuclear war breaks out. Monster fires rage over North America; the Northern
Hemisphere becomes uninhabitable. Small pockets of Homo sapiens hold out
down south, but not for long. Soon, only the cockroaches remain.

Alongside these horrible prospects, Scenario III seems positively sunny. Here,
in Ehrlich’s “best case,” the United States cuts off food aid
to Egypt and India, countries “beyond hope,” and institutes domestic
food rationing. “Pope Pius XIII” urges “all good Catholics
. . . to drastically restrict their reproductive activities,” giving “his
blessing to abortion and all methods of contraception.” Famines and food
riots sweep through Asia, Africa, and South America. However, a “die back,” claiming
500 million lives through starvation, is successfully navigated by the nations
with food, and a one-child-per-couple world finally settles into a sustainable
population of two billion in 2025, falling to 1.5 billion by 2100.

The Population Bomb succeeded as well because it got some things right.
In an area actually close to his expertise, Ehrlich correctly condemns the excessive
use of insecticides, including DDT, and the absurd federal government campaign
of that era to exterminate fire ants in the South. He is right about sloppy chemical
use, about industrial pollution and fish kills, and about the foolishness of
the SST (Super Sonic Transport). Ehrlich advances good ideas about putting a
price tag on pollution and using incentives to discourage gas-guzzling autos.

Monstrous Vision

All the same, Ehrlich’s overall policy agenda is monstrous in vision and
sweep. He casts humanity as a cancer on the planet, and calls for a “cutting
out of the cancer,” an operation that “will demand many apparently
brutal and heartless decisions.” He opposes “family planning,” because
it leaves families with an element of choice.

Domestically, he toys with the idea of putting sterilizing agents in the water,
but shifts instead to tax policy. He would turn the child income-tax exemption
on its head, placing a heavier net tax on families with three or more
children. He would impose luxury taxes on layettes, cribs, diapers, and toys.
The government would give grants to couples who married late, prizes to childless
marriages, and bonuses to those who sterilize themselves. Free abortion, sex-selective
reproduction, and sex education in the schools (focused on the recreational side)
should also follow.

Internationally, Ehrlich calls for “drastic policies.” He would use “coercion
in a good cause. . . . We must be relentless in pushing for population control
around the world.” Adapting the principles of triage, food aid for “hopeless” nations
such as India, Egypt, and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) would be denied. Only
governments ready to impose birth control on their people—including mandatory sterilization—would be helped. On the religious plane,
he condemns the Christian God, who, it is said, “made for us a world to
dominate and exploit.” In place of this polluting God, Ehrlich praises
both pagan animism and the hippie movement, with its embrace of Zen Buddhism.

Ehrlich’s ideal world actually exists today in once-Christian Europe and
parts of Asia. Spain, Italy, Russia, Saxony, the Czech Republic, the Ukraine,
the Baltic states, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, and Korea all are near the one-child-per-couple
average and all face accelerating depopulation. The driving force in these places,
however, may be less Malthusian ideology and more a militant secular individualism
in league with the anti-natalist incentives of “modernity.” In any
case, we find in such lands abundant food alongside diminishing human numbers.

This is the strange legacy of welfare capitalism. Elsewhere on the globe, human
populations are also in freefall in the early twenty-first century, a phenomenon
ably analyzed in Phillip Longman’s 2004 book, The Empty Cradle.
Rapidly aging populations and too few children are the apparent future, even
in places such as China, India, and Mexico.

While The Population Bomb stands as a historically powerful document and
a testament to the power of ideas (especially bad ones), it reads today as a
quaint embarrassment. Meanwhile, Humane Vitae’s time may have come.
Paul VI’s courageous encyclical affirms “the very serious duty of
transmitting life” and recognizes married persons as “free and responsible
collaborators with God the Creator.” It labels the generation of new human
life a “mission” and endorses “the thoughtfully made and generous
decision to raise a large family” as compatible with the world’s
natural order.

Widely rejected and ridiculed nearly four decades ago, these words emerge now
as clear answers and reliable guides to confronting the true population disaster
looming over the twenty-first century.

“Weapon of Misinstruction” first appeared in the March 2006 issue of Touchstone. If you enjoyed this article, you'll find more of the same in every issue.

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